Inside Art

By Carol Vogel

Published: March 30, 2007

The Drawing Center Names a Director

After a year's search the Drawing Center has appointed an executive director: Brett Littman, who has been deputy director of the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, Queens, for nearly four years.

Mr. Littman, who will begin his new job on May 7, has a lot to juggle as he tries to revitalize an institution that many in the art world say has seemed rudderless for several years, and perhaps to move the center from SoHo to Burling Slip, at John Street, in Lower Manhattan.

''Brett has close ties to the artistic community, and we are hoping to reconnect with artists making art today,'' said Frances Beatty Adler, chairwoman of the center's board. ''That's always been part of our mission.'' At the same time, she added, the center will continue organizing exhibitions that deal with drawings from a historical perspective.

Mr. Littman said he planned to focus on programming as well as the possible move. ''Because of my background I am particularly interested in contemporary art, architecture and design,'' he said. ''I am hoping to broaden the investigation of drawing and to get artists involved in what we do.''

Great Expectations

Sotheby's is confident that prices for contemporary art will climb even higher than they already have. So far two paintings in its important evening sale of contemporary art on May 15 have estimates that exceed the current record prices for works by these artists.

Last week Sotheby's announced that it would auction ''White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose),'' a classic 1950 canvas by Mark Rothko owned by David Rockefeller, the philanthropist and chairman emeritus of the Museum of Modern Art. Sotheby's estimates that it will fetch more than $40 million, nearly twice the record for a Rothko, $22.4 million, set at Christie's in New York in 2005.

This week Sotheby's disclosed the cover image of the sale catalog: ''Study From Innocent X,'' a 1962 work from Francis Bacon's series of paintings based on Vel?uez's ''Portrait of Pope Innocent X'' (1650). Auction house experts said they thought it would bring more than $30 million. (The record for a Bacon is $27.5 million, paid at Christie's in London in February for ''Study for Portrait II,'' from 1956.)

''There's already considerable interest in the painting,'' said Tobias Meyer, director of contemporary art for Sotheby's worldwide. ''We've been trying to get this painting for a long time, and now the seller realizes that the market is strong, and this is the time to sell.''

Bacon painted about 50 papal images from as early as 1946. ''Study From Innocent X'' is the first in the series in which he took Vel?uez's use of red as inspiration for his own canvas, saturated with rich tones of maroon, orange and bright red.

''He uses red on red, which is a very audacious thing to do,'' Mr. Meyer said. The painting, he added, ''has an extraordinary surface: a mixture of oil, sand and pigment.''

Bacon painted most of his popes as screaming, tortured figures. But in this painting the pope is sitting regally on a throne, which seems to be in motion.

Sotheby's would say only that the painting is from a private collection and was acquired more than 30 years ago, but experts familiar with the work say the seller is Mona Ackerman, the daughter of the financier and collector Meshulam Riklis.

Generous in Seattle

Like the Dallas Museum of Art, which has recently been promised $400 million worth of art by philanthropists passionate about supporting their local museum, the Seattle Art Museum is boasting a record number of recent gifts from collectors in its community.

To celebrate its 75th anniversary (which officially takes place next year) it has received gifts -- some promised, others outright -- of nearly 1,000 works that experts familiar with them say are together worth nearly $1 billion. Among the highlights are sculptures by masters like Brancusi and Richard Serra; paintings by Edward Hopper and John Singleton Copley; and a monumental installation featuring nine automobiles by the Chinese-born artist Cai Guo-Qiang. That artist, perhaps best known for his pyrotechnic display over Central Park, sold the work to the Seattle Art Museum. It was on display at Mass MoCA two years ago.

''Seattle is a city known for innovation,'' said Mimi Gates, the museum's director, ''fueled by all the businesses here: Amazon, Microsoft, Starbucks, Costco.''

The gifts are timed to the opening of a new building by the Portland, Ore., architect Brad Cloepfil on May 5. Its donors' gifts have not been limited to art. The institution has also raised more than $200 million, of which $175 million is for the expansion and the sculpture park and $25 million for acquisitions.

High-Profile in Venice

The Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca will have a particularly big presence at this summer's Venice Biennale. For starters he has been chosen to represent Argentina in its pavilion, which will be housed this year in an early-17th-century building near the Teatro La Fenice opera house. His work will also be included in an exhibition organized by Robert Storr, the curator who is dean of the Yale School of Art and director of this year's Biennale.

''My work will be in stereo,'' Mr. Kuitca said in a telephone interview from his studio in Buenos Aires. His particular challenge will be the pavilion, a richly ornate Baroque interior. ''The whole place is painted -- the ceilings, the walls,'' he said. First he will neutralize the floors by installing a wood surface. On free-standing walls, he will display a group of paintings he described as incorporating ''echoes of Cubism and elements of Fontana,'' referring to the Argentine painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana.

The canvases, which measure about 13 feet high and 6 1/2 feet wide, will have a panoramic effect, Mr. Kuitca said. They are a departure from his past work, which has relied heavily on architectural elements. Instead, in creating these new paintings, he has looked to the history of modern painting, particularly abstraction.

The works will be on view in Venice for the duration of the Biennale, which runs from June 10 to Nov. 21. After that Mr. Kuitca will gear up for a retrospective that will open at the Miami Art Museum in October 2008 before traveling to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.